With development of mobile communications technologies, there are more applications in a terminal and there are more terminals, and correspondingly, the terminal has increasingly higher requirements on a transmission capacity of a wireless network. To satisfy the requirements on the transmission capacity of the wireless network, deploying a cost-effective WLAN (wireless local area network) in a 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) network is a main technical solution used by a mobile operator to resolve the capacity problem.
However, because the WLAN cannot well ensure QoS (quality of service) of a service, and a service having a relatively high requirement on QoS assurance may be interrupted because the WLAN network is busy, which cannot ensure quality of service, how to perform service offloading in an area in which both the WLAN network and the 3GPP network are deployed is one of the most important research subjects for a person skilled in the art.
An existing service offloading method includes: user equipment pre-saves a service offloading rule; and when initiating a service, the user equipment selects a 3GPP network or a WLAN network according to the service offloading rule, to bear the service, where the service offloading rule specifies a bearer network corresponding to each type of service. For example, to ensure quality of service of a video service, the service offloading rule specifies: when WIFI (wireless fidelity) is in an enabled state, the user equipment enables the 3GPP network to bear the initiated video service, and enables the WLAN to bear a web page browsing service that does not have a high requirement on quality of service; when the WIFI is in a disabled state, all services initiated by the user equipment are borne by the 3GPP network; when the WIFI is in an enabled state and the user equipment requests web page browsing, the user equipment may select the WLAN to bear the web page browsing service.
During the implementation of the present invention, the inventor finds that the existing solution has at least the following problems:
Because a bearer network is selected, by using a preset service offloading rule, for a service initiated by user equipment, the existing service offloading method cannot well adapt to changes of a wireless environment. In this case, one network may have excessive load while the other network may have empty load, causing a low network utilization problem.